Hey Hey Helen

 Back in 2022, I was on a roll making ABBA costumes!  I probably made about 6 costumes recreations for my dolls, and for me, that is a lot!  I was in my "trying to get everything as accurate as possible" era, and not to toot my own horn, I did a fairly good job at that. In more recent years, I feel extremely grateful to the fact that I have been able to buy more accurate fabrics, experiment more with trial and error even if it means wasting a bit of money, and that was certainly reflected in my sewing project from that time.

Part of what inspired me then and still does inspire me when it comes to recreating ABBA costumes is looking through all of the outfits that I had attempted to make before and ultimately wasn't satisfied with, mostly due to lack of materials.  At that time I used what I had, even if it didn't quite look like the real thing.

As you all know, I have a tendency to remake costumes multiple times.  In 2018, I began my 2nd ever recreation of Agnetha and Frida's 1975 tour outfits, the iconic outfits with Frida's very "provocative" skirt and Agnetha's skintight jumpsuit with the flowy sleeves.  The first time I ever attempted these outfits was in 2012, and they were not the greatest, so in comparison, the 2018 ones were amazing!  All the details of how I made the 2018 versions are on this blog already (Agnetha, Frida, Benny, Bjorn), and I was quite proud of them.  

Then in 2018, I went ahead and gave my ABBA dolls new bodies, which resulted in different proportions and coming to the realization that the outfits I had spent all of last year working on were no longer fitting right.  I was still quite proud of these versions of the outfits, so in 2022 I had the idea to reuse elements of the outfits and just swap out bits and pieces, tailor them better, etc, and I got to work on gathering materials.

Frida's outfit was really easy to fix up.  I got a beautiful iridescent tablecloth off of Amazon that I used to add sparkle to each skirt panel (with the exception of the waistband... I will fix that later...), added that same fabric to the sleeves, the top of the boots, and only had to make a few modifications.  I also added a couple more details late last night at 2 AM, so the results aren't perfect, but I'm pretty happy with it, and I'm glad I was able to reuse and salvage most of the original outfit.  Although I did have to make a whole new cape which I again did at 2 AM last night, so not my neatest work.  Ideally I could have found a sequin fabric that didn't look so pink, but it also only looks pink in certain lighting. 

So that's Frida's outfit done.  Most of it was completed in 2022, and I did it first because it was fairly simple and easy and straightforward.

Now I thought Agnetha's outfit would be fairly straightforward as well.  I just had to redo all the sleeves/legs with a more translucent fabric rather than the tulle layered over jersey fabric that I had previously done, and do over the trim to be more accurate.  Using this image that the lovely Angeleyesabba on tumblr took at ABBA the Museum, I was able to get a good look at the trim on Agnetha's cape, and that same trim appears on each and every layer of floof on her outfit, and also around the collar and each limb.  I had the idea to get a green glitter ribbon, trim it to get the nice rounded shape as seen on the actual outfit, and then buy individual white sequins and sew them on one by one.  

Originally, I used organza for the layers of sleeves, and I hot glued the green into place, and began hand sewing in the sequins.  I spent hours and hours stitching on the sequins, but my hands and wrists were cramping terribly and I realized the process was going to take forever!

So eventually, I realized I needed to take a break, and moved on to other projects.  Mind you, this was in summer of 2022.  Every couple of weeks I would attempt to sew on more sequins, some of which was even done with my beloved Skyler Bird perched on my shoulder, but I just couldn't make any progress.  So I paused working on it, focused on other sewing projects, and also, Skyler passed away in March of 2023, and that kinda made me not want to work on much, which can definitely be noticed in the fact that I only made three outfits that year.

Eventually, over this past summer, I realized I didn't like the way the organza was draping.  It was too thick, and I just didn't like it, so I bought chiffon and decided to do the legs all over again.  I also came to the realization that i just didn't like the body of the outfit either, so I redid that too.  and so far so good!  The chiffon was draping beautifully, looking almost identical to the actual outfit, and I was so happy.  But that still left the issue of the trim!  Hand sewing everything was a nightmare and would take too much time, so i decided to use hot glue!  I started on one sleeve, glued on all the green, started gluing on sequins, this time ones that came as a string and I could just glue it on in the pattern I wanted... right?  Wrong.  That ended up being wayyy too thick, and it ruined the beautiful drape of the chiffon, and it was just too chunky and looked terrible.  So I peeled off all the glue, tried sewing it all down, but still ran into the problem of it taking too long because it required too much hand sewing.  

So I scrapped the project again, until last week when I came to the realization that maybe trying to be as accurate as possible just isn't feasible, and definitely not at this scale.  It completely goes against my normal thought process - normally I try to be a perfectionist in everything, doing everything I can to make it look as identical to the original outfit as humanly possible.  It should be possible to recreate the fancy trim, it just seems to be beyond my skill set.  So against my perfectionism, my OCD, and my better judgement, I bought a trim on etsy that I thought would get me a similar enough effect, and it came super quickly and is a very beautiful trim.  But it ended up being too wide and I just didn't like it.

Finally, I decided the best thing to do was go back to my first ever idea.  In my first to recreations, I just used green sequins to get the desired effect.  It is in no way accurate, and certainly doesn't look like the real thing, but for sure if you were to see it on the final outfit, you'd know what I was intending to do.  So I bought a roll of sequins on amazon, it arrived the next day, and I stayed up way too late last night sewing it in (with the machine might I add, so it made it a lot quicker!), and, it's better.  It definitely doesn't let the chiffon drape as nicely as it should, but compared to how it was draping before, it definitely looked better.  And now here we have it, two and a half years later, my completed outfit for Agnetha, complete with a satin green cape as well!

(that is my nail not a weird brown stain on her chin lol)

This is definitely not my favorite recreation I've ever done, but it was the best I could do with what I had and what I am physically capable of doing.  Perhaps someday I'll be able to find a nice 1/4" trim with green and white sequins that I can easily replace all the green sequins with.  But until then, this will have to do, and I accept that sometimes you have to work within your limitations.  This also gives me a much greater appreciation for Owe Sandstrom and his original costumes.  I can't imagine how long it must have taken to add the trim on a full size outfit!